


changes are shifting outside the word

by PaperRevolution



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Abusive Relationships, F/F, F/M, Gen, Grief/Mourning, M/M, Mental Health Issues, Past Abuse, Sibling Bonding
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-08-09
Updated: 2017-12-29
Packaged: 2018-12-13 09:30:51
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,249
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11756961
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PaperRevolution/pseuds/PaperRevolution
Summary: Modern AU. Fleeing a toxic relationship with Joffrey Baratheon, Sansa returns home from university. Meanwhile, Bran and Meera try to come to terms with the accident that cost Jojen his life and Bran the ability to walk.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Takes place in the UK, predominantly in Glasgow.
> 
> Title is from "No More I Love You's" by Annie Lennox.

“I need to come home.”

Sansa sits on the floor with her back against the closed door. Her knees are pulled tight to her chest, the carpet scratchy beneath her bare feet. The few personal touches in her room here—a dragonfly windchime; a cluster of photos on the corkboard above her desk; a poster of the album art from her favourite band’s latest wispy, folksy concept album, The Old Songs—are achingly familiar.

“Hello?” Her foster mother’s voice is tangled with static. Sansa shifts the phone from one hand to the other and the line crackles.

“It’s Sansa,” she tells Brienne. Her voice is flat. “My—sorry, my old phone broke. I got a new one.”

The phone line buckles again with the weight of a sigh.

“What happened to not wanting anything to do with your ‘common as muck’ family?” Sansa can hear the hurt in Brienne’s voice, hard-edged, and she doesn’t understand. “Decided you actually give a shit what happens to your brother now, have you?”

She shuts her eyes. Opens them again. Forces herself to take a breath.

“My—What?”

Brienne is immovable. “You’d better be glad your parents aren’t alive to see the things you wrote in that email. I don’t care what you think of me,” Lie. Blatant lie. “But the things you said about Arya and Bran and Rickon are unforgivable.”

Comprehension begins to dawn. Her heart catapults wetly into her throat.

“I didn’t,” she swallows thickly around the swollen lump. “I didn’t send any email.”

Brienne makes a sound—something between a bark and a scoff.

Footsteps thud overhead in the room above hers. Sansa’s breath catches. The air is thick and close.

“I—” she tries, and then again: “I didn’t. He—Joff—he must have—”

“He’s never going to walk again,” Brienne interrupts her. She speaks with precise, deliberate force, like she’s throwing rocks.

Sansa is thrown.

“Who?” Her voice is strange; strangled.

“Who d’you think?”

She chokes on a sob. “Brienne, I don’t know. I swear I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

There’s a silence, little and weighted.

“There was an accident,” Brienne says. “Nearly three weeks ago, now. I tried to phone you, text you, everything. That was when you sent me—when I got the email.”

Sansa stumbles to her feet. She feels too tall for her shitty little room in her shitty little student house. She’s eaten the magic cake or bread or whatever it was and, just like Alice in the White Rabbit’s house, any moment now her enormous arm will go smashing through the little window, and her head will buckle the ceiling. There will be plaster in her hair and the sky will be boundless overhead but she’ll be trapped, roof-tiles jabbing shattered corners into her neck.

“What accident?” her voice is thin and scratchy. “What happened? Who—?”

“It’s your brother,” says Brienne, sounding tired now. “It’s Bran.”

And Sansa feels like she’s falling.

* * *

The house is quiet.

Sometimes, Meera—curled like a comma under a mound of blankets—feels the silence as an aggressive sort of hum. It whorls with the silver force of a pneumatic drill. One day, soon, it is going to crack open her skull and then she will never have to move again.

Between headaches, the silence takes on a different quality; a muted, shushing white-noise which she hates even more than the drilling because it isn’t enough to distract her from the thought that keeps lancing at intervals through her fractured consciousness, pinning her helplessly to the mattress.

Jojen is dead.

He’s gone, and no matter how hard people try to dress it up—“The other car came out of nowhere; you couldn’t have known,” (her mother) or, “How’s it your fault that some crazy fuckwit rammed you off the road?” (their neighbour, Osha)—it’s because of her.

Meera knows some of the details, now. She knows that the other car hit her father’s borrowed Toyota on the passenger side. She knows that by the time Howland’s car flipped over, completely upending, her brother was probably already dead.

She knows that she, in the driver’s seat, was spared the worst.

She wants to cry, but her chest hurts too much for that. Any time she does anything more than take slow, careful breaths, the dull ache concentrates into a sharp volt of pain and a feeling of shifting.

There’s a soft knock at her bedroom door, and then the low burr of her father’s gentle voice.

“Meera?”

He sounds cautious. Her father, the most steadfast person she knows.

Meera closes her eyes and pretends to be asleep.

* * *

On the train from Exeter to Birmingham, Sansa tries to read. She can’t manage two sentences without picturing the car spinning out of control on a rain-slick road; without imagining the terrified yell tearing out of her younger brother’s throat.

Every time the train stops, her muscles clench and she’s frozen. She imagines Joffrey boarding the train. She imagines him slipping into the empty seat next to hers, and the razor’s edge of his sidelong grin as he asks her if she’s missed him.

At Birmingham New Street, she buys a bottle of water to give herself something to do while she waits for her next train. On the platform, she clutches the bottle like a lifeline, taking tiny sips every so often.

She imagines him reading Brienne’s messages with that look on his face like he’s just smelled something bad. She pictures him composing a reply, biting his lip to quell his laughter.

Somehow, on the train from Birmingham to Glasgow, for the first time in she’s not sure how long, she manages to drift into an uneasy, broken sleep.

In her home city, she tries to stop seeing Joffrey at every turn. Sludgily, woozily awake, she takes the subway to Kelvinbridge and spends the brief journey staring straight ahead at her pale, distorted reflection in the window opposite. Her hair is lank and greasy. Her eyes are hooded. She looks like the sort of person her younger self would cross the street to avoid.

Off the subway and emerging from the escalator into watery March sunlight, lugging her case behind her, she searches for Brienne. But it isn’t her foster mother who’s waiting for her.

It’s Arya.


	2. Chapter 2

Arya’s hair is shorter than Sansa remembers, an uneven fringe arrowing darkly across her forehead. She stands with her hands stuffed into her pockets, shifting restively from one foot to the other. She looks older—her face is thinner, more angular; it makes her look pixie-ish in a hard sort of way—but apparently her boundless energy is the same. She does the smallest of double takes when she catches sight of Sansa.

“Fucking hell,” she says. “You look a right state.”

Sansa shrugs a shoulder noncommittally. “Where’s Brienne?”

“Working. She said I could have the day off school if I’d come and meet you instead. Dunno why. Maybe she thinks you’ll forget your way home like you forgot to phone or text or any of that stuff once you got to uni.” Arya’s expression is stony. She kicks up gravel with a dusty-toed Doc Marten.

“Arya,” Sansa says, plaintively.

Without looking back over her shoulder, Arya starts to walk. Sansa catches up with her easily, her suitcase juddering on cracked paving stones as she pulls it behind her. The two o’ clock sky is pewter coloured and heavy.

“Got a Facebook message from Jeyne Poole the other week,” Arya still isn’t looking at Sansa. Her eyes are fixed straight ahead. She walks like she’s on a mission. “She was like, ‘Is Sansa okay, question mark question mark question mark’.”

“Did—did you answer her?”

Arya snorts. “Nope.”

This doesn’t surprise Sansa, who knows too well that Jeyne had been almost as much of a bitch to Arya as Sansa herself had been when they were younger.

They walk in silence for a while. Rain begins to fall; a fine, half-hearted drizzle. When they reach the house, Arya pelts up the steps to the front door like she’s trying to put as much distance as possible between herself and her sister. She’s already opened the door and disappeared inside by the time that Sansa, hefting her suitcase, reaches the top of the steps which, as a child, she’d imagined as a sort of moat separating their little town house from the pavement below.

Shutting the door quietly behind her, Sansa is struck forcibly by how little has changed. There are the unopened letters on the little table to her immediate right. There is the large wicker basket piled high with shoes and the occasional hat or scarf. There, mounted on the wall at intervals, rising with the gradient of the stairs, are the years of school photographs. In one, she and Arya, tiny and both sporting braids, are bracketing a solemn-eyed baby Bran, each with a protective arm around him.

In the kitchen, Arya turns the radio on. Some indie rock band, swampy bass blasting loud. Sansa takes a step towards the sound, but a moment later the kitchen door slams shut with a dull finality.

Sansa, blinking furiously and trying to swallow the hard knot in her throat, goes upstairs to unpack.

* * *

Meera sits in the passenger seat of her mother’s Land Rover and tells herself to breathe.

She had been managing okay until it had started to rain. Now water is snailing down the windscreen in small, slow tracks and her hands are gripping the sides of her seat and she’s watching the rain break the little blue car in front of them into tiny mosaic pieces and—

“Meera,” says her mother quietly. Everybody is saying her name all the time, like it’s the one bit of driftwood they can afford to throw her to keep her from sinking. “You don’t have to do this yet.”

She swallows. Her throat is needles, or tiny slivers of glass.

“I do,” she says, and her voice is scratchy. It sounds like the voice of a person who hasn’t spoken in years, she thinks.

Her mother sighs, loose strands of hair flying upwards from her face. Jyana’s hair is the same indeterminate sandy red-gold-brown that Jojen’s had been, but it curls around her face in a paler approximation of Meera’s. She looks like both of her children and therefore not really like either of them.

“You need to give yourself time,” Jyana’s fingers tap the steering wheel in a light rhythm. Her shoulders are tense, angled. “Bran will understand that.”

She shifts gears. Meera imagines herself in her mother’s place. She imagines Jojen beside her, messing with the radio, and Bran leaning forwards from the back seat—

—glass shattering glass raining in somebody yelling loud loud stop so loud and all the colours all the colours spinning loud loud loud—

The car pulls to a stop.

Dimly, she hears the click of her mother’s seatbelt unbuckling. And then Jyana is telling her to stop it; to remember what she’s been told. You need to try to breathe properly or you’ll hurt yourself.

“Shut up!” she hears herself yell. Her voice is pitchy, buoyed by a gasp. And she’s fumbling with the door, trying to get it to open, but her hands are shaking. And her mother is saying her name again but it doesn’t even sound like a word anymore.

The door flies open. She tumbles out; slams it shut. She stands for a moment on the pavement, gulping cold air. She’s weak-kneed, her limbs loose and heavy like something waterlogged.

“We can walk from here to the hospital,” Her mother, bracing an arm around her shoulders, her voice low and even. “It’s not that far. Okay? We’ll walk the rest of the way.”

Meera, in the midst of attempting to pull air into her body and push it out again, manages a nod.

* * *

Sansa is sitting hunched on the bottom stair, waiting for Brienne to come home so that they can go and see Bran, when her phone rings shrilly.

For a long, disconnected moment, she stares at the tight group of white letters on the screen that make up the name of the caller. It’s Mya Stone. Mya, the first friend she’d made at university. Mya, who’d persuaded her to get away when she’d found out how bad things had become with Joffrey. Sansa doesn’t feel much like talking, but she can’t afford to lose any more friends.

She answers the call; brings the phone up to her ear.

“Hello, Sansa,” says the voice at the other end of the line.

And the voice isn’t Mya’s. It’s Joffrey’s.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There will be a Willas and a Bran in the next chapter, I swear. Heh.


	3. Chapter 3

Joffrey.

Sansa’s stomach does a sudden nosedive, clenching painfully. She swallows the hot, rancid taste of bile at the back of her throat and hangs up the phone before he can say another word.

Her hands are shaking.

Why does Joffrey have Mya’s phone?

Her heart is pattering at her ribcage like a small, frantic animal. She lets the phone fall with a muted thud onto the carpet and squeezes her eyes tight shut. But it’s too easy to imagine his proximity, like this; too easy to feel the warm weight of him, the rush of his breath through clenched teeth—

The doorbell rings.

Sansa’s eyes snap open.

It’s him, she thinks irrationally. He’s here. He’s here for her and he won’t leave until she agrees to go with him. Does he know where she lives? He probably knows. It wouldn’t be hard to find out. What will he do when—

Again. The doorbell rings again. She’s frozen. Her knees are locked. Her hands are clenched. She’s motionless except for the relentless thrumming of her heart; the kick of it.

And again. He’s not going away.

From the kitchen, she hears Arya swearing volubly. The sound of her sister’s voice galvanizes her, because Joff can’t—he can’t hurt her. Sansa can’t let that happen.

She lurches to her feet, gripping the bannister for support. Her hand slides, sweat-slick, on the dark wood and she stumbles. She makes it to the door in two long strides (if she gives herself any time to think, she’ll find herself rooted to the spot again), twists the key in the lock and wrenches it open.

The cold air hits her like a tide. She reels, bracing herself.

It isn’t him. It isn’t Joffrey.

This man is taller than Joff, and probably quite a bit older, though he has one of those youthful, ageless faces that make it difficult to tell just how much. He’s thin, rangy, wearing a charcoal grey blazer and leaning slightly on a slender wooden cane. His hair, the colour of milky coffee, curls in haphazard directions at the neck of his shirt.

“Oh—Hello,” his expression registers surprise, eyes widening slightly. “You must be—You’re Sansa, aren’t you?”

She nods mutely, wondering wildly how he knows her name. His accent is all smooth edges and long vowels—somewhere south, but not London, she doesn’t think. Could he be a friend of Joffrey’s? She resists a sudden urge to slam the door in his face.

“Well,” the stranger quietly clears his throat. “I’m Willas. My family live a few doors down from you?”

“Oh.” Willas. Sansa releases a slow breath. “Okay.”

Willas’ forehead crinkles, his eyebrows quirking upwards. “Excuse me, but are you all right?”

Sansa nods again, vigorously. She must look ridiculous, standing here wagging her head like one of those bobblehead dogs people put in their car windows. “I—yes. Thanks. Did you—erm, did you need something?”

Did you need something? Really.

Willas shifts his weight from one foot to the other. There’s a carefulness in the way he moves—not cautious, exactly, but measured. “I was wondering whether you’ve had any letters meant for me? Only, I’m expecting something, and Dad thinks maybe he didn’t put the right house number on the—you know, the form you fill in when you want your post to get redirected to a new address?”

“I’ll have a look,” she tells him, leaning to scoop up the pile of post from the little table on her left. Her fingers fumble with thick white envelopes and longer, thinner brown ones, shiny junk mail and a local newspaper which she immediately sets aside again. “Is it anything exciting?”

Anything exciting. What sort of a stupid thing to say is that? He’ll think she’s off her head; this quivering, stumbling girl who can barely string together a coherent sentence.

But Willas only smiles sheepishly. “I’m applying to do a PhD,” he tells her as she flips through unopened letters. “Or, well, I mean, I’ve already applied. I’m supposed to find out whether I’ve been successful, round about now.”

Sansa just barely stops herself from nodding again. “Wow,” she says, very intelligently. “That’s—What do you want to, er, do it on?”

“Sansa!” Arya’s footsteps thunder down the hallway behind her. “Brienne texted. She says to be ready in five minutes. She’s on her way home now.”

“I was ready ten minutes ago,” Sansa glances over her shoulder at her sister. Arya’s hair stands up in unruly spikes. Her voluminous black hoodie drowns her.

“Oh, it’s you,” she says to Willas, ignoring Sansa completely. “I’ve seen you about. You need a new bike; your one’s shit.”

Willas laughs before Sansa can admonish her sister. “It does the job,” he replies.

Arya grunts dissent. “Looks like an old man bike.” She pauses. “And there’s no letters for you. I already had a look.”

“Oh.” Willas’ face flushes. His eyes skitter downwards, becoming suddenly very interested in the threadbare ‘Welcome’ mat on the top step. “Right. Sorry to bother you again.”

“We’ll give it you if it gets sent here,” replies Arya in a bored voice. Willas drags a hand through his curls and steps back slightly.

“Thanks,” he says quickly. And then: “See you later, Sansa? And Arya. Both of you. At some point.”

Then he turns, and Arya, stepping smartly around Sansa, closes the door behind him.

* * *

Bran is awake and staring at the ceiling.

Hovering in the doorway and trying to gather her words, Meera is struck by how completely expressionless he is. There’s a flat blankness in his eyes that makes her catch her breath.

“Hi,” her voice emerges as a tiny squeak. She swallows thickly and takes a halting step forward.

Bran looks at her, but doesn’t say anything. She had expected him to appear smaller than usual in his hospital bed, but he looks more-or-less like he always does, only surrounded by white.

“I’m—I wanted to come sooner,” she tells him, “But—”

“They said you weren’t hurt,” Bran interrupts. His voice is toneless.

This is a lie—one of the many they’ve told him, probably—but Meera doesn’t tell him that.

“I’m sorry,” she says instead, inadequately. She takes another step closer to his bed and clasps her hands together behind her back to keep them from trembling.

“For what?” asks Bran. “For the fact that you were the only one of us who wasn’t destroyed by this? Or for the fact that you were driving? Or for the fact that Jojen’s dead?”

Meera’s breath snags. There isn’t any malice in Bran’s voice; only a brittle kind of bluntness.

“Bran,” she says. But she finds she has no idea what to say. There are no words for this—only the hollow, bone deep echo of a loss that can’t be spoken.


End file.
